Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote on 2001-02-05 00:12 UTC:
> Will Japanese elementary school's
> policy change to teach Chinese and Korean characters also?
What are you talking about? Japanese people will always use Japanese
Unicode fonts to display plaintext (unless they use multi-lingual
software for multi-lingual applications). This is easy to implement. In
fact, XFree86 4.0 shipped with *ONLY* a Japanese Unicode font, there
still isn't a Chinese one. Nobody in Japan will ever or has ever been
bothered by Chineses glyph shapes used to display Japanese text! Any
fear to the contrary is a false misconception by a few geeks who misread
the Unicode 1.0 and 2.0 books, which unfortunately used only one single
Chinese font to render the CJK section. The Japanese anti-Unicode fuzz
is just a highly theoretical fear, *not* based on actual reported
real-life user problems. In case you didn't notice, >90% of Japanese
word processing has been done in Unicode for many years now (thanks to
the market dominance of a certain word processor produced in Redmond,
which has been fully Unicode based since the 1997 release). Which
fraction of the Microsoft Support helpline calls do you think complain
about non-Japanese glyph shapes in Japanese text? Similarly the most
popular Japanese email software (M$-Outlook) uses a Unicode editor and
display system! ISO 2022 is just generated when a message leaves the
system via SMTP, because the developers were told that this is still
necessary for compatibility with older Unix email tradition even though
the message is converted back to Unicode on most receiving systems.
> It is an
> undeniable fact that a part of Han Unification is unacceptable for
> average Japanese people, regardless of the principle and rationale
> of Han Unification.
"Average Japanese people" have been using mostly M$-Word with Unicode
for how long now? How many "average Japanese people" still consider
Linux distributions useless crap software because it doesn't support
Japanese as simply and easily as the Unicode based competition products
from Redmond do?
We are aiming to get Japanese character processing just as smoothly
integrated into the very fabric of the Linux infrastructure as ASCII,
and I am certain that neither so-called ISO 2022 implementations nor any
other existing Japanese Unix legacy practice is going to help
accomplishing this in a globally sustainable way. We need one single
encoding, and language or font style tagging are independent, optional,
and orthogonal issues to that. The existing Japanese fonts and input
methods used will remain the same.
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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